Sun, 30 May 2010

FP-Syd #24.

On Thursday May 20th, we held the 24th meeting of the Sydney Functional
Programming group.
The meeting was held at Google's Sydney offices and we a bit over 20 people
show up to hear our two presenters.

First up we had
Raphael Speyer
presenting his impressions on leaning the Ocaml programming language and
applying to writing a version of the game "Four in a Row" also known as
"Connect Four".
The game is a two player game and Raphael implemented the game rules and some
basic artificial intelligence so that a single player can play against the AI.
Rapahel seemed to have a positive experience with Ocaml and the
Batteries Included
libraries.
The performance was quite as good as he would have liked, but discussion seemed
to suggest that switching from lists to arrays would probably improve things.
Raphael has made his code available as a
github project.

Our second presenter for the evening was Eric Willigers who presented on the
subject of the
Scala
language's
Actor
library, a library implementation of Erlang's message passing primitives.
Eric gave us a number of demos that showed how Actors behave.

A big thanks to Raphael and Eric for presenting and Google for providing the
meeting venue and the snacks.